


Frater

by ishafel



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 07:03:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4909858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleep, and his brother Death.  Declan Lynch character study</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frater

Until he was five years old, Declan Lynch is his father’s favorite son, handsome and clever as a dream. “ _Declan, _” Niall Lynch says to him, and the way he says it, it is as if he saying, “Hope,” or “Promise.”__

__And then, from out of Declan’s younger brother Ronan’s dreams, there is Matthew, round and soft and perfect, where Declan is hard and Ronan sharp. Niall Lynch loves Matthew-- they all love Matthew-- but it is Ronan he praises. To Declan, he says nothing at all. He is there sometimes, gone sometimes, a shadowy figure that they both love and fear._ _

__When Declan is seven, his training begins in earnest, and now Niall does talk to him. It is his job, Niall says, to protect his brothers and his mother. To protect Ronan, he means. All three of the Lynch boys learn to box, but only Declan learns to shoot a handgun, to use a knife. With your life, Niall says, and at first they shoot targets, black circles on white. Later his father takes him deep into the woods and they shoot dream creatures, white stags with red eyes, purple tigers with dark blue stripes, eagles the size of Volvos._ _

__They probably wouldn’t have been friends, Declan and Ronan, not in any world at all. They were too alike, the two angry wild sons of Niall Lynch; they were too different, Declan cold and Ronan hot. But it is their father who makes them enemies. Niall is between them, always, in a thousand cutting ways, even when he’s disappeared to Bangkok or Chelsea or El Paso or Greenwich, Connecticut._ _

__Ronan is too impatient, loses his temper too quickly, lacks discipline. Declan has too much discipline and not enough passion, and worse, he isn’t Ronan. The two of them fight like wolves whenever Aurora Lynch isn’t there to stop them, and sometimes when she is. Niall, when he is there, encourages it, and when he is present most of the fights end only when blood is drawn._ _

__Until Niall Lynch dies, until Aurora Lynch falls asleep, until he’s forcing Ronan under the shower and scrubbing their father’s blood off his sobbing, swearing brother, Declan doesn’t really believe. Someday someone may come, his father had said. Someone dangerous. I may not be here. You need to be ready._ _

__Declan takes the Sig Sauer, which if you look closely isn’t really a Sig Sauer, into the woods and puts six shots into a paper target, all of them inside the 10-ring. He thinks of the red ruin of his father’s head, and does not feel ready. His father’s lawyer reads the will, and the Lynch brothers go into exile in Henrietta, princes without a kingdom. He and Matthew move into a dorm at Aglionby and Ronan moves into Monmouth Manufacturing._ _

__He can’t keep them safe. He can’t keep Ronan safe even from himself. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t talk to Ronan about anything or to Matthew about anything important. Declan has never failed at anything in his life, but he is failing his brothers, his dead father and his dream of a mother._ _

__When the Gray Man comes, when he’s fought and lost, when he realizes Matthew’s phone is lying on the bed across the room, when Ronan’s phone rings and rings and rings, that is when Declan Lynch truly hates his brother for the first time._ _


End file.
